News announcement Idris Khan appointed OBE in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List

Idris Khan, 2017

Portrait: Andrew Farrar

Artist Idris Khan has been appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for

services to Art in the Queen’s Birthday 2017 Honours List.

Drawing inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts,

Idris Khan investigates memory, creativity and the layering of experience. He is acclaimed for his large-

scale works – in media including sculpture, painting and photography – in which techniques of layering

are used to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely

new through repetition and superimposition. The density and precision of his images allude to the excess

of information in the technical age, while encouraging a slower and more engaged way of looking and

responding to our collective history and culture.

Khan first gained attention for work in which he used digital technology to overlay and combine series of

visual or textual work: every Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph of a gable-sided house, every page of

the Quran, every late Constable painting, every stave of Chopin’s Nocturnes. While photographic in

nature, the resulting images possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting and are presented

as a kind of palimpsest, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand.

Victoria Miro

Major commissions include a wall drawing commissioned by the British Museum in 2012 for its

exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam. In addition, for the duration of the exhibition, Khan’s

monumental floor installation, Seven Times, was installed in the museum’s Great Court. Also in 2012, The

New York Times Magazine commissioned Khan to create a new body of work for its London issue. Focusing

on the capital’s most iconic buildings and structures, Khan’s image of the London Eye featured on the

cover. Khan’s major commission for a permanent public monument, forming the centrepiece of the new

Memorial Park in Abu Dhabi, was unveiled for UAE Commemoration Day in November 2016. He was

recipient of a Culture Summit Abu Dhabi 2017 award for contributions to cultural diplomacy.

Khan has also worked on significant collaborations across art forms. In 2014 he worked with

choreographer Wayne McGregor and composer Max Richter on Richter’s recomposition of The Four

Seasons, producing sets for the production which premiered at Zurich Opera House. Lying in Wait, 2009,

a collaboration by Khan and choreographer Sarah Warsop in association with Victoria Miro and

Siobhan Davies Dance, is formed of layered movement that travels between three screens.

Born in Birmingham in 1978, Khan completed his Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Art and lives

and works in London. The recent survey exhibition Idris Khan: A World Within was held at The New Art

Gallery Walsall (February – May 2017), with solo presentations of the artist’s work previously staged

at national and international institutional venues including the Whitworth Gallery, University of

Manchester (2016 - 2017 and 2012); Sadler’s Wells, London (2011); Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden

(2011); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Kunsthaus Murz, Murzzuschlag,

Austria (2010) and K20, Düsseldorf (2008). His work has also been included in group shows at the

National Gallery of Art, Washington (2015); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2014 - 2015); Tel Aviv Museum

of Art (2014); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida (2013);

The British Museum, London (2012); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Fundament

Foundation, Tilburg (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); and Martin-Gropius

Bau, Berlin (2009).

An exhibition of new work by Idris Khan will be held at Victoria Miro in October 2017.

For further press information please contact:

Victoria Miro

Kathy Stephenson | Director of Communications | kathy@victoria-miro.com | +44 (0) 20 7549 0422

Rees & Company

Chloe Nahum | chloe@reesandco.com | + 44 (0) 77 42 23 91 78